Newspapers, magazines, trade journals, books and other types of visual content have existed in various forms for several hundred years. With the advent of electronic communication devices, however, it is increasingly desired by consumers to view such content using such electronic devices.
Accordingly, digital content has become popular. However, most electronic publications are generated in a single, final form, suitable for a specific purpose or device. Adapting these electronic publications to a different device entails reprocessing the original content. In some cases, point-to-point file generation (i.e., transforming the original content format to the required output format) may be utilized. If the requirements of the output format change or if an additional output format is required, these approaches entail repeating the entire file transformation and generation process, including the quality control steps necessary to ensure that the file transformation is accurate. Additionally, since various formats have their own distinct capabilities regarding the details of the content, point to point transformation has the potential for loss of fidelity with each transformation. This is similar to the loss of fidelity in transforming graphic files from one format (e.g., tif) to another (e.g., jpeg).
What is desired are methods and systems to transform the digital content into a canonical format to normalize the digital content in a way that decouples the digital content from the file format required by consuming devices.